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Top 10 WordPress Website Maintenance Tips

Top 10 WordPress Website Maintenance Tips

Every site, whether it’s a WordPress blog or a fully-blown WooCommerce portal, needs regular maintenance. WordPress maintenance involves checking your site’s configuration, functionality, security settings, available updates, unused files, and more. Just as with a house or a car, ongoing maintenance can prevent major technical issues down the line and keep your WordPress secure.

Most WordPress maintenance tasks take minimal time and can even be automated. You might even use a maintenance checklist like this article to help you remember every job you must do and how often. Doing so will keep your site running in top shape without paying for WordPress maintenance services or putting your website into WordPress maintenance mode.

This article will cover the ten most crucial WordPress maintenance tasks you need to cover regularly. We’ll discuss how each task works and why it’s essential. Let’s get to it!

The importance of maintaining your WordPress website

WordPress maintenance is an ongoing process, much like Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s not something you can do once and then forget about.

If you don’t keep up with WP maintenance, visitors might run into errors and downtime while navigating your pages. Basic maintenance tasks such as plugin updates, backups, and performance optimization can significantly improve the performance and user experience on your site while reducing security risks.

WordPress maintenance services can cost you a pretty penny. However, there’s often no reason to pay for dedicated support if you know your way around basic WordPress maintenance tasks.

Of course, it can be difficult to find time for these tasks. However, it’s essential to make the time because proper maintenance is key to maintaining a healthy website and avoiding errors. Plus, some tasks – such as checking for broken links, performance optimization, and making your site more mobile-friendly – can even improve your pages’ SEO.

Overall, the more time you spend on maintenance tasks, the fewer site-breaking errors you’ll encounter and the less downtime your users will experience. How’s that for a win-win?

Top 10 WordPress maintenance tasks

In this section, we’ll cover the most important website maintenance tasks you need to be able to carry out.

You don’t have to be a WordPress developer or WordPress security expert to be able to perform any of these tasks. All you need is a bit of time and effort. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand the basics of how to keep your WordPress website running in top shape.

1. Perform regular backups

Performing a full-site WordPress backup is arguably the most important WordPress maintenance task. A complete site backup provides a restore point if anything goes wrong. If you run into a site-breaking error or your website gets hacked, you can simply restore it to an earlier backup instead of spending hours troubleshooting.

Ideally, you’ll back up your website every day. You can do this manually by copying your site and database files to a different storage location.

In most cases, the best option is to use a WordPress web host that backs up your website automatically every day. Many hosting services do this, particularly managed WordPress solutions:

Kinsta dashboard

If you do not want to use the services offered by your hosting provider, you can always opt for a WordPress backup plugin instead, take manual backups, or use an online service. Consistency is more important than how you backup, and remember to do test restores to ensure you can successfully restore your website should something happen.

Whatever method you use, creating backups is the kind of maintenance task you should automate. Daily maintenance takes too much work when done manually. Plus, if you only back up your site periodically, you may lose a lot of information when you restore your website.

2. Update WordPress core, themes, and plugins

One of the leading causes behind WordPress errors and security issues is neglecting to update and maintain the core software and its components. If you look at update logs for any major plugin and WordPress.org itself, you’ll notice many of them are related to security issues and bugs.

The more time you spend using outdated software, the more often you may encounter errors. Moreover, updating WordPress and its components is so simple that there’s no reason not to do it often. You also get access to new features that can help you improve different aspects of your website.

At least once a week, go to the WordPress dashboard and open the Updates tab. Look at the list of components that need updates, and execute all of them:

WordPress dashboard

For themes, you only need to focus on updates for the one you’re currently using. However, updating all installed themes only takes a few seconds, so why not do it?

P.S. You might want to disable any themes and plugins that you’re not actively using to improve the security of your WordPress website.

Updating WordPress core, plugins, and themes can lead to errors sometimes. That’s why you must have a solid WordPress updates strategy in place before updating WordPress to a major new version or performing multiple plugin upgrades. It also pays to have a recent backup in case things go south.

Even better is access to a staging environment; this is the safest approach to use when updating your website. You can run updates on the staging site, verify that they don’t cause any errors, and then push them to the live website.

Some managed WordPress hosting providers offer automatic updates for the CMS and its components. However, the process is so straightforward that we recommend checking for updates manually.

3. Delete unused themes and plugins

If you find yourself updating dozens of WordPress plugins and themes regularly, but you’re not using most of them, it’s time to consider removing them. Deleting inactive plugins and themes frees up space, removes entries from the WordPress database, and makes maintenance tasks go smoother.

Delete inactive plugins

If you’ve installed multiple plugins, take a few minutes to review that list. See which tools you’re actually using and delete the ones you aren’t.

In terms of frequency, we recommend checking your list of active plugins every couple of months. If you update your site often, you’d be surprised at how many plugins can accumulate, so it pays to reduce that bloat.

4. Regularly check and optimize your website for speed

When you launch a website, every page should load almost instantly. As you customize the site, add new plugins and features, and change its design, it can slow down. That means pages will take longer to load because they include more data.

This isn’t a problem if the loading times remain reasonable. By reasonable, we mean under a couple of seconds. Studies show that bounce rates start to increase drastically after the two-second mark. Search engines also penalize websites that are slow to load.

You can use plenty of free tools to monitor page loading times, such as PageSpeed Insights (which also measures Core Web Vitals), Pingdom Tools, and Google Analytics.

Pingdom website speed test

To test a page using Pingdom, enter its URL in the URL field and click on START TEST. You’ll receive a breakdown of its loading time and potential improvements. That last part is essential if you want to decrease loading times across the board:

Improve Page Performance

Here are a few ways to decrease the average page loading times:

  • Optimize images. Optimizing images before or during upload can drastically reduce loading times because image files can weigh a lot. You can optimize images using online tools such as TinyJPG or WordPress plugins like ShortPixel.
  • Reduce the number of third-party scripts on each page. Third-party scripts and elements (such as Google Fonts) need to connect with an external server to execute. Waiting for responses from those services can increase page loading times. Therefore, reducing the number of scripts will help pages load faster across your entire site.
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN will cache your site’s content on its servers. These servers are configured for faster loading, which will decrease the load on your own server.
  • Leverage browser caching. You can configure how browsers cache your website’s content to reduce loading times for return visitors. At the very least, browsers should be caching images from your site.

There are a lot of things you can do to increase website loading speeds. These are just some of the most impactful changes you can make.

For the best results, we recommend checking the loading times for several of your site’s key pages every month and keeping track of the results. If you notice loading times increasing, there’s probably a problem with your site’s configuration or server load.

5. Harden your site’s security

WordPress is a secure CMS out of the box. However, you can do many things to harden WordPress security. This is essential even if your website doesn’t store sensitive user data, as attackers might use your website to propagate spam or malware.

The most important WordPress security task is updating the CMS and its plugins and themes to the latest versions. Updates often include security patches, so you shouldn’t wait too long to get them.

Besides updating WordPress core, here’s what you should be doing to increase WordPress security:

  • Enforce the use of strong passwords. Motivating (or forcing) users to use strong passwords is the most effective way to protect WordPress users’ information. That applies to administrators and staff as well. We recommend using a plugin to enforce strong passwords in WordPress.
  • Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Implementing 2FA in WordPress, alongside enforcing strong passwords, means accounts on your website should be basically unbreachable. Using 2FA means attackers cannot brute force their way into user accounts.
  • Add CAPTCHAs to your WordPress forms. CAPTCHAs are so common because they’re elegant solutions to complex problems. CAPTCHAs make it almost impossible for bots to brute force login forms, inject malware, or submit spam comments. They also make your life easier since you’ll spend less time moderating spam, and you won’t have to pay for expensive malware removal services.

The more steps you take to secure your website, the less maintenance work you’ll need to do to protect it. That’s a good thing because there are a lot of other WordPress maintenance tasks that will demand your attention.

6. Optimize the database

“Optimizing” the WordPress database means removing unused tables and rows. Many WordPress plugins leave orphaned entries in the database after you’ve deleted them. This bloat can slow down database queries, which in turn slows down your website. This is where database optimization comes in.

Navigating the database and determining which entries you can safely delete can be tricky. Before making any database changes, we recommend backing up your website. If you followed our automatic backup recommendations, this shouldn’t be a problem.

There are several WordPress database tools that you can use to make sure the database is running in tip-top shape. With regards to frequency, this largely depends on the size of your website. Once a month is a good place to start from, then you can adjust depending on your results. This will help you to minimize bloat as your website (and, by extension, database) grows.

WP Optimize

7. Delete unreferenced and unused files

As your website grows, you’ll likely accumulate files on its server that you don’t use. Images are the most common culprits. Leftover files, such as temporary configuration and backup files can also add bloat and expose you to security risks.

The result is that your server is storing hundreds of unreferenced files, sometimes big ones. These files pose a problem both for storage and backups. Most hosting plans offer limited storage, so if you have unused or unreferenced WordPress files, it makes no sense to keep them on the server.

Plus, full copies of your site include every file in the server and the whole database. If the server contains many unreferenced files, backups will be larger and take longer to create.

To avoid this, we recommend checking WordPress folders every few months and seeing if there are any images or files you’re not using. If there are, go ahead and delete them.

Broken links can be problematic. If a user runs into a broken link on your website, they might think your content is outdated or no one is checking for errors. Moreover, broken links can harm SEO by hurting your search engine rankings, as they can lead to increased bounce rates and less time on site.

If the broken link points to an internal page, that’s even worse. For every click on a broken internal link, you’re missing out on users spending more time on your website. Plus, it makes your content look untrustworthy.

Modern websites often include thousands of links, both internal and external. Monitoring all those links manually is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, plugins such as Broken Link Checker plugin can automate the process of fixing broken links:

Broken link checker

You can use the plugin to scan your website for links to pages that don’t exist or aren’t loading. The tool also checks pages for missing images and redirects.

Once you’ve identified a broken link, you can correct it if it’s wrong or point it toward another page. By the end of the process, every link should work and point to relevant pages.

Links can break, so we recommend running full site scans for broken links every month. Functional links make your website look more professional and can increase engagement, so don’t put off this task.

9. Test your forms from time to time

Forms are one of the most essential elements on any website, especially for eCommerce stores. Moreover, they’re one of the few fully interactive elements in web design. If a form stops working, it can prevent you from receiving new leads, support requests, and even payments.

Considering how vital forms are, it stands to reason that you should test them periodically. That means using the form as a regular user and checking to ensure that it works. In most cases, when you submit a form, you should see a success message.

If the form doesn’t display a success message, make sure you’ve received an email notification when someone makes a submission. Depending on the type of form, you probably already get an email upon submission (such as for contact forms).

Your goal should be to minimize downtime for forms as much as possible. Therefore, we recommend testing your site’s critical forms at least once per month. You should also ensure a copy of all submitted forms is saved in WordPress in case email deliverability becomes an issue.

If you suddenly stop receiving notifications about new submissions, that’s usually a sign that a form is not working correctly. In that case, jump right in and test to ensure the form functions as it should.

BONUS TIP: Protect your forms with CAPTCHA 4WP

While spam is unlikely to break any of your forms, it can take advantage of unprotected forms to inundate your inbox with all sorts of garbage. You can easily mitigate risks associated with spam by using CAPTCHA 4WP. It supports different types of CAPTCHA, including ReCAPTCHA V3, for a non-intrusive CAPTCHA implementation.

10. Regularly check and optimize your site for mobile

One of the most significant changes of the last decade is that most people now browse the web via mobile devices. That means most of your site’s views may be from smartphone users. However, when you think about web design, you might still imagine layouts created primarily with big screens in mind.

That means every change you make to your website’s design and functionality needs to look and work perfectly on mobile devices. This is somewhat easy nowadays since most WordPress themes are mobile-friendly.

Furthermore, the Block Editor makes it easy to design pages with small screens in mind:

Block editor

Whenever you update your website, take a minute to determine whether the changes work well on a mobile screen. Testing with even one device is a good start because it will reveal any glaring errors. However, if you can test your designs on multiple smartphones and tablets, that’s the way to go.

Ideally, you should do design and functionality testing for your entire website at least every few months. This will let you catch and correct usability issues before they scare users away.

Bonus tip: Monitor user activity

WordPress maintenance boils down to knowing what is going on on your website. To this end, monitoring user and system activities can uncover potential issues early on. The easiest way to monitor a WordPress website is by using an activity log plugin.

WP Activity Log is a WordPress plugin that provides an in-depth overview of everything that happens on your site. You can use activity logs to monitor what users are doing, look for specific activities, track e-commerce transactions, and even configure custom notifications.

Second bonus tip: User management

Users are an essential part of many WordPress websites. Keeping tabs on what users are doing using an activity log goes a long way; however, preventive measures are equally important. Make sure you assign the correct roles and review them occasionally as users’ duties change. Disabling inactive users can also help you lower overheads while reducing security risks. MelaPress Login Security allows you to set up policies for this, helping you automate an otherwise tedious task while drastically improving your WordPress login processes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does WordPress need maintenance?

Yes, WordPress sites need regular maintenance to ensure they can continue to function in tip-top shape. Regular maintenance also avoids unnecessary downtime, helps keep your site secure against potential security breaches, and improves your search engine rankings.

What is the WordPress maintenance plan?

WordPress site owners and administrators looking for a WordPress maintenance plan have a few options to choose from. Undertaking your own WordPress maintenance is not as difficult as you might think. In our top WordPress maintenance tasks article above, we show how, thanks to good planning, you can easily carry out important maintenance tasks yourself. Alternatively, you can engage a maintenance and support services company to handle WordPress maintenance for you.

What are the advantages of WordPress maintenance?

When you perform WordPress maintenance tasks, you are setting up your website for success. WordPress website maintenance carries a lot of advantages. It reduces unplanned downtime and keeps your website secure and fast. By keeping your website snappy, you can also improve search engine rankings since slow websites are known to be penalized.

Should I use a WP maintenance mode plugin?

It depends on the type of maintenance you’ll be doing on your site. For short jobs that do not impact the performance and usability of the website, displaying a maintenance page might be unnecessary. For longer maintenance jobs that will impact the website, using a maintenance plugin can save visitors additional frustration.

Use WordPress Maintenance to Keep Your Site Running Smoothly

Many people spend so much time working on content, looking for leads on social media, and growing their small business sites that they forget about website maintenance. Maintenance isn’t fun, but it ensures that your WordPress site runs smoothly. Knowing how to carry out these tasks yourself will save you from spending money on expensive WordPress maintenance services.

Once you get the hang of site maintenance, it’s time to focus on hardening your WordPress website. That means increasing its security to ensure visitors get the best possible experience and your WordPress user data is always protected.

Do you have any questions about WordPress maintenance? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

Posted inWordPress Management
Danny Sullivan
Danny Sullivan

Danny is not just a blogger; he's a dedicated WordPress enthusiast with a decade-long immersion in the vibrant WordPress community. When he's not passionately crafting engaging blog posts, Danny spends his spare moments immersed in literature, enjoying the company of friends, and whipping up delectable meals in the kitchen. Connect with Danny at danny@melapress.com to share thoughts, ideas, or perhaps, exchange culinary tips!


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